Queens Of The Stone Age, Mumford And Sons and The Black Keys have been the main claims of the Madrid stage
Rock night, rock of those who could already be considered old acquaintances or at least veterans, is what the second day of Mad Cool 2023 has provided this Friday, with Queens Of The Stone Age, Mumford And Sons and The Black Keys as rockets that they have put the festival into orbit.
From the rawest sound to the one that flirts with funk or folk, each one of them has added different flavors to that recipe, but always with the guitar and drumbeats as the main ingredients for the delight of the 67,000 diners who, according to the organization, have attended today to the newly opened Iberdrola Music space, to the south of the city.
Faced with its first day, much more pop and soul, this time it has been more difficult for the Madrid event to warm up, not because of the temperatures, which once again exceeded 30 degrees in the afternoon, but because the first artists have not shown the same convening power, with the permission of the singer-songwriter Angel Olsen and his taste for flying atmospheres or the Dutch band dEUS and its serious bases at ground level but very danceable.
“My goodness, it’s hot!” exclaimed the British with the sun in his face sam smith, the first that has aroused a significant mass of followers to enjoy a proposal of white soul and melodic pop without gender ascriptions that to a large extent connected more with the offer of the previous day, when Lizzo or Lil Nas X played, for example. It is possible to imagine that nobody had warned her that the shirt and the very tight golden corset with which she has jumped on stage was not the best outfit to function in Madrid two hours after nightfall. Fortunately, it has only been one of the many models that she has worn, proportionally almost as many as there are known themes, to highlight a pompous purple dress in the first case and cuts like ‘Stay with me’, ‘Promises’ or ‘Unholy’, in the second. second. In front of a huge sculpture lying on the stage, also in gold, Smith has exhibited his great capacity for melodic nuances, a facet further reinforced by a good handful of stupendous black voices as accompaniment.
That said, when the festival has definitely started is when the American band took over at the end. Queens Of The Stone Age, who have contagiously opened their show with the song ‘No One Knows’. Precisely Josh Homme and company played in Madrid for the last time five years ago, in that fateful Mad Cool 2018 in which everything happened also coinciding with another move, then from the Magic Box to IFEMA, and the Californian, dissatisfied with those VIP redoubts Sparsely populated but located right in front of the stage, he encouraged his fans to jump over the fences and move closer to the band. More relaxed in that sense, but equally contagious, his live show has played a good handful of songs from his latest album, ‘In Times New Roman’, but without forgetting other emblematic works such as ‘…Like Clockwork’ (2013) and cuts like ‘A Song For The Dead’.
“Do you know the last concert we gave in Barcelona? I still think it was the best of that tour because we found the best audience in Europe… until maybe tonight”, said Marcus Mumford, leader of mumford and sons, before what was perhaps the surprise concert of the day due to the power of convocation. Because beyond his excellent work, for example, for the OST of the series ‘Ted Lasso’, Mumford has not had great commercial successes in Spain since they brought folk back into fashion with their first albums, “Sigh No More” (2009 ) and especially ‘Babel’ (2012), with hits like ‘I Will Wait’ that have not stopped playing tonight among a fireworks castle. A possible explanation may be that they had not played in the city for 10 years, the elapsed since their only recital in the capital up to now, the one they gave at the Palacio Vistalegre with its terrible acoustics, something for which they have finally retaliated with a quality sound that has allowed us to enjoy their catalog of instruments beyond the usual of rock, such as the banjo, the dobro or the double bass.
The same confluence has registered the appointment with The Black Keys, other prodigal figures from the capital since the concert in 2012 that left such a good taste in the mouth with his southern accent and his nods to blues and soul, then just when they had just launched their commercial bombshell ‘Lonely boy’ as part of ‘El Way’ (2011). Four albums later, the latest being the recent ‘Dropout Boogie’ (2022), Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have put the finishing touch on this day of rock, hardly a warm-up for lovers of the genre if one takes into account that the big stars of tomorrow’s closing ceremony will be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with all the tickets sold.